She's kept the weight off, made peace with her ex, found love again — and discovered a new mission in life. Here, Valerie Bertinelli shares the secrets of her later-in-life success.

Chop. Chop. Chop. Valerie Bertinelli is slicing and dicing her way through a pile of zucchini, eggplant, and mushrooms with the flair of a professional chef — or, at least, a confirmed Food Network junkie. It's one of those rare rainy days in Southern California, and the soon-to-be-50-year-old actress, best-selling author, and Jenny Craig spokeswoman who dropped 40 pounds to show off a size-6 bikini body is cooking up a pot of Tuscan vegetable soup (see recipe).

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"Only 63 calories a cup," she says cheerfully. And that includes a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.

It is not quite what she truly craves. That would be the tortellini en brodo that her Italian grandmother used to make, which Bertinelli refers to as "a religious experience." But, she adds, her own calorie-conscious soup "soothes the belly."

There was a time, not so many years ago, when Bertinelli defined "comfort food" differently. As she explains in her 2008 memoir, Losing It, and last fall's follow-up, Finding It, Bertinelli once used food not only to celebrate good times and family traditions, but also to numb the pain she felt in her rocky 20-year marriage to rock-guitar god Eddie Van Halen and the effect it had on their son, Wolfgang. She swallowed her anger and heartache, piling on weight and insecurity. The yo-yo dieting and self-sabotaging behavior turned the lovable TV star into an anxious and sometimes angry mom who, despite her fame, tried to hide her real self from the world.

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Now, as her 50th birthday approaches (it's April 23), Valerie Bertinelli is a woman transformed. She has slimmed down and made peace with her ex, and she is reveling in her romance with her "spousal equivalent" of the past five years, financial planner Tom Vitale. Even her sex life has improved (more on that later).

It's obvious from the way she carries herself that Bertinelli is in a much better place these days. Walking from the kitchen counter to the stove — with a pedometer measuring every one of the 10,000 steps she takes for exercise each day — she has a bounce in her stride, and is wearing slim jeans and a black V-neck and has reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She smiles constantly and laughs loudly, making cute little crinkles form at the edges of her eyes — a sign that the only thing that's gone under the knife in this kitchen is the veggies in today's soup.

"I've earned all these years on my face," she declares, ruling out cosmetic procedures for the time being. "I don't want to be a liar if in five or 10 years I do get some Botox, but needles in the face scare me, so I don't really know if I am ever going to do that. I can't even get to the dentist right now and I really need to, so how am I going to get Botox done?"

Beside her in the spacious kitchen, Vitale takes all this in with appreciative chuckles. While she's making the soup, he's tossing salad. "The napkins are right here on a roll," he says, motioning to a paper-towel dispenser.

Abandon any ideas you might have about this rich and famous actress's life. Yes, she lives in Malibu, but it's all very paper-towels-for-napkins casual at the Bertinelli beach house. She is every bit the girl-next-door she played on One Day at a Time, the sitcom that made her a teenage star, but she also has the grit and backbone of the many characters she played in TV movies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. And she still has just a trace of the wild streak and the colorful language you'd expect from a Hollywood star and rock 'n' roll wife.

"I'm a little bit of a loudmouth," Bertinelli admits. (Do not get her started on the topics of Tiger Woods and Fox News.) She feels blessed to be able to put her outspokenness to good use, to tell other women — and men — how much she gained by getting rid of not just the physical weight that made her feel fat, but also the emotional issues that caused her to overeat in the first place and followed her well into her 40s.

Taking It Off

Finding comfort in food was something Bertinelli learned early. The only girl in a family of four boys, one of whom died at 17 months before Bertinelli was born, she learned to love sports and adapt to frequent uprooting as her GM-executive father moved the brood across the U.S. It was a warm and loving family, though not necessarily one in which heart-to-heart talks were the norm. "We didn't show or talk about our emotions," she has said. When faced with a problem, Bertinelli learned to "suck it up and deal with it" on her own.

One of the ways she dealt with it: indulging in the rich foods that are part of her Italian heritage. She recalls comments about her weight that stung, even before she was an actress comparing herself to her rail-thin costar Mackenzie Phillips. She tried virtually every diet, no matter how dangerous. At one point, she weighed a mere 98 pounds.

She gave up drug use in her 20s, and emotional eating — or overeating — remained her bad habit. "It wasn't one particular food; I just had no Stop button," she explains. It was a battle that the 5'4" actress would wage for three decades, ballooning from the 110 pounds listed on her first driver's license to a high of 172. It wreaked havoc on her self-esteem. Bertinelli remembers the period following her 2001 split from Van Halen as one of the most damaging: "I would get home from work and drink vodka with cranberry juice and eat jalapeño cheese poppers. I did that for months, and I think it was all about punishing myself. A jalapeño popper never solved my problems, not once."

It took almost six more years for her to realize that going on a very public diet was the right move. "This has really, really been good for me," she says of the weight loss that she has maintained since joining Jenny Craig in March 2007. "People come up to me and tell me how I changed their life and I've inspired them. And they tell me their stories, and that keeps me going. This really is the great leveler and equalizer — when people talk about their weight and how they let it consume their lives."

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She remains laser-focused on maintaining her weight loss: "I don't want to gain those 40 pounds back again. That statistic rings in my ear: Around 95 percent of people who have lost weight gain it back within five years. I am just a couple years into this. And I don't want to go through it again. Ever."

She is realistic about her weight, which hovers between 128 and 132 these days. "I still have a pooch," she says. "You can see that I am fleshy. That's OK. I don't have to be 2 percent body fat. I'm too old for that. I have to be happy with what I have."

It has not always been easy. Bertinelli has to be vigilant so she does not eat unconsciously. When she feels an urge for jalapeño cheese poppers or a Heath bar, she drinks another glass of water. "None of us drink enough water," she says.

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Her other keep-it-off tips are simple: If she feels tempted to nosh, she goes for a drive, takes a walk, or runs instead. She swears by the power of physical activity, both to squelch a craving and to burn calories. Bertinelli will put on workout clothes in the morning to remind her to exercise by the end of the day. On days when you just don't want to work out, "you just have to take the first step," she advises. "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

She doesn't avoid restaurants, but often splits entrées and takes leftovers home for another meal. And since she's susceptible to all kinds of food yens — sweet, savory, and points in between — she doesn't deny herself, but satisfies cravings with just a taste: "Portion control is the key."

The rewards of such dedication are both large and small. "Being able to go in your closet, pick anything out, and put it on is empowering," she says. "When you feel like you can't do that, you start beating yourself up. There are millions and millions of women across the country who feel the same way. And we all deserve better. I think I speak for a lot of women; we get to a point when we lose the weight, and then we don't feel like we deserve it. We self-sabotage, and we're back to where we were once again. But you're allowed to be happy; you're allowed to be content." And she's proof of that.

Her Two and a Half Men

But it's not just food that Bertinelli has taken control of as she nears the big 5-0. She's also gained much wisdom about the men in her life. She wed Eddie Van Halen shortly before turning 21. She now admits that she was too young to marry. "The 20-year-old Valerie would have been interesting to talk to," she says. "I'd have said to her, 'Go ahead, get married, but don't think it's going to be this white picket fence.'"

It wasn't. There were conflicting work schedules, separations, and blowups. Both she and Van Halen were unfaithful. She says her two affairs were attempts to get her husband's attention and shore up her downward-spiraling self-esteem; neither of them served their purposes, and both filled her with remorse. "I am not the same person now that I was then, so I have to forgive that person. Because when you know better, you do better," she says. "If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn't have behaved in the same manner."

When son Wolfgang was born in 1991, Bertinelli threw herself into family life. Yet her husband remained a hard-partying rock 'n' roller, and she had her own addiction. "You [should] use food to nourish your body or to have some fun out with people, but I abused it," she says. "I would get high on food."

Their rocky romance finally unraveled late in 2001, when Van Halen came to visit her on the set of the TV show Touched by an Angel< in Utah and she found cocaine in his wallet. When she finally confronted him about it, he denied it. She said, Get clean or get divorced. He answered by dropping the F-bomb on her. That was the moment she decided to leave for good: "Back then, I could pretty much say, 'My life sucks,'" she says. "[I thought,] 'Am I going to continue in this marriage, being this miserable and making him miserable?'"

When the couple separated, Bertinelli vowed they would rally around Wolfie: "We [had] both treated each other unkindly. It was a matter of, 'Why don't we just move on and give our son as much love as we possibly can?' Divorce isn't the child's fault. Don't say anything unkind about your ex to the child, because you're really just hurting the child."

Noble as her goals were, single life ushered in a challenging period for Bertinelli. "At first, I was in so much pain, I literally lost my appetite — but when it came back, it came back with a vengeance. And I think it was all about punishing myself," she says. There was a litany of things she felt she deserved to be punished for: the failure of her marriage, the effect it would have on her son, the compromises she had made in her career, and, of course, her weight.

But by the time she filed for divorce in 2005 (Why did it take so long? "I'm a procrastinator," Bertinelli says with a shrug), she had already been introduced to Vitale. In the language of Hollywood screenwriters, they "met cute." Vitale, a friend of one of Bertinelli's brothers, took an extra seat at a wine-tasting fund-raiser; meanwhile, Bertinelli's sister-in-law had wanted to set Bertinelli up with a doctor, who showed up with a date he announced as his fiancée. Bertinelli and Vitale kept slipping away separately to check up on the World Series. They ended up watching the game in the hotel bar together.

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The next night they were cooking together in her brother's kitchen. Vitale remembers thinking, "This is how it's supposed to be. This is how you get along with somebody."

He'd had a crush on Bertinelli since he was a teen tuning in to watch One Day at a Time; he confesses that he even kissed her TV image. Their first real-life smooch came after a month of dating. He was treading carefully. "When we first met," says Vitale, who divorced in 2003, "we were both in a place of brokenness, but open — ready and willing to be completely honest, and ready to peel ourselves back like an onion."

Bertinelli's relationship with Vitale is so strong because the two are so delighted with one another exactly the way they are. "During my marriage," says Bertinelli, "I wanted Ed to change; Ed wanted me to change. It was, 'If you love me, you'll do this.'" With Tom, "it was, 'This is who I am, take it or leave it,'" she explains. "I didn't expect him to change or become a different person to live with me, and I know he doesn't expect that from me either." She adds, "I won't ever cheat on Tom, and he won't ever cheat on me. I believe that. And if he does, well then, it's over."

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In even the smallest matters in their relationship, Vitale is gallantry personified. "Fortunately, after [our] being together this long, there's nothing I want her to change," he says. "She wants me to put the seat down on the toilet. So I do. It's just nicer for her." As for whether the two of them will tie the knot, Bertinelli says, "When someone refers to him as my husband, I don't even correct them anymore. We would love to have the ceremony because it would be fun and a great excuse to have a party, but I don't want to plan it!"

Vitale not only supported Bertinelli's weight-loss journey, but also joined her on the Jenny Craig program, losing over 40 pounds himself. He is her best buddy, closest confidant, and biggest cheerleader. She and Vitale share an Italian-American upbringing and a commitment to parenting their blended brood: her son Wolfie, who has just turned 19, and Tom's four kids, ages 10 to 19. Most notably, they enjoy the bantering of two people who are so honest and in sync with one another that they can easily finish each other's sentences. That ability to communicate so familiarly leads to some rather raucous attempts at one-upmanship.

"He's funny, and he's really good in bed," Bertinelli says with obvious enthusiasm.

"And on the couch, and on the floor, and on the kitchen counter," he adds with a wicked grin.

"Sex is very different," she continues. "I can't speak for anybody else who's been married for a very long time, but five years into my marriage, Ed and I were barely doing it. Here Tom and I are, five years into it, and there is no slowing down. Not that we're hanging off chandeliers; we're just really connected. Even if George Clooney walked in right now and said 'Drop everything,' I'd say, 'Thanks, but I've got this.'"

And her relationship with Van Halen has evolved; Bertinelli says the key was her not blaming him for the failure of their marriage. "If we would get into a disagreement about something," she says, "the first thing that would pop into my head was, 'Do you want peace, or do you want to be right?' Always pick peace first."

She and Vitale attended Van Halen's June 2009 wedding to Janie Liszewski. "I can't live with Ed. He can't live with me. We're not good in that way," she explains, "but I love him and love that he's happy."

Finding Her Faith Again

For Bertinelli and Vitale, who were both raised in Catholic families, acts of kindness and forgiveness are part of their core spiritual belief: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A renewed sense of faith has bonded them as a couple and, according to the formerly infrequent churchgoer, it has brought her closer to God.

"I have faith in faith," Bertinelli says. "God is there, whether we have faith or not, so why not have faith in him? I won't know if I have really conquered weight-loss maintenance until the day I die, and I won't know if this faith that I have learned to appreciate has been put in the right place until the day I die. And I'm OK with that. If it makes me behave in a better way and if it makes me treat people better, then I'll have faith."

Her faith is not something that goes untested. After all, she is the mother of a teenage son. At age 16, Wolfie joined the family business, becoming the touring bass player in the band Van Halen. Now, at 19, he remains two credits shy of finishing high school. Trying to get him motivated to be a good student has been stressful for Bertinelli, whose career presented her with exactly the same problem. While she did wear a cap and gown to a graduation ceremony, there was no diploma for her, and she has been talking about getting a GED ever since.

As a role model, she also feels guilty that she might have passed on emotional eating to her son, who gained weight when she and his father separated. "Motherhood is the job I thought I was really good at, but I think I failed in the one place that is my own weakness," she says.

Vitale won't hear of it. "You are good at it," he says. "You beat yourself up too much, because nobody raises perfect kids. You raised your son really well. He has a phenomenal moral compass."

Bertinelli certainly agrees. Wolfie doesn't drink or do drugs; last Thanksgiving, he cleaned up the house without his mom's even having to ask. "I texted him and thanked him — acknowledging that I appreciate the little things is important," she says. And he has a long-term girlfriend. "He could be dating Lindsay Lohan — and I could be having a heart attack." Though he has a room at home, Wolfie is building his own life. As she considers her almost-empty nest, she recalls how she "messed up a bit" in her 20s, and adds, "I'm going to be holding my breath for the next 10 years...but it's a good thing, because I am not still hanging onto that umbilical cord...I am proud of being the mother I am. I feel the fun part is over and now the hard part begins, keeping a connection with an adult child, but I'm sure I'll get through it."

What 50 Looks Like

On the cusp of 50, Bertinelli seems to have her best-ever self-esteem. "I feel smarter," says the avid crossword-puzzle solver, "and my common sense has gotten better." Looking ahead, she'd like to be acknowledged as more than just a competent actress, but, she jokingly admits, "I have more control over getting my butt in a bikini than getting an Emmy." Now that she's bared her bathing-suit bod for all of America to see after a rigorous training regimen, she needs a new goal — and she's found one. On April 19, just four days before her birthday, she'll run her first marathon (though she insists, "Ugh, I look like such a geek when I'm running!"). "I'm going to be in good enough shape to run it; it's just wrapping my head around it," she says. "That's the hard part. Like with the bikini, the message was that at any age, if you put your mind to something, you can do it. Just do it. You are worth it."

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Though she chides herself for not reaching out and making plans to see the friends in her book club and other pals often enough, Bertinelli remains a loyal friend. She has reconnected with and supported her former costar Mackenzie Phillips in the wake of Phillips's painful revelations last September about her incestuous relationship with her father. "When we worked together, I never would've thought that was happening," Bertinelli says. "I had absolutely no idea. She hid it for a long time, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is telling the truth. I have seen her for 30 years, and I have seen how tortured she is, how she just couldn't get straight. I know people who have been through rehab multiple times, and she's one of them. When it's that difficult to get sober, I believe there is stuff that is just too painful to deal with, and that's why they medicate themselves." Seeing her friends and loved ones through their pain has helped Bertinelli heal her own wounds and pushed her toward a state of grace and gratitude.

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While Bertinelli is not one to make much of age, when she looks ahead to where she'd like to be on her next big birthday, the answer she offers is simple: "I'd love to be a grandmother, and I'd love to be that 60-year-old who lost all that weight 13 years ago and kept it off." It's not just the unwanted, unhealthy pounds she got rid of, she says. "It was that heaviness I felt in my heart — that is gone more days than not." She now feels loved as much as she loves others, praises herself for the progress that she makes instead of punishing herself for falling short of the perfection that none of us can achieve, and lives in a place of gratitude rather than regret.

"I try to start every morning before I get of bed saying, 'Thank you, God, for this life you've given me,' and really start the day off with the right attitude," she reflects. "And I realize that I have a message. 'I am a fully rounded person who isn't that much different than you are, and I've been through a lot of the same stuff as you, and, God, can we share?' "